Barrier turns holy city into hostile fortress

Jerusalem came to the unsuspecting people of Nu'man in 1967 as an imaginary line across their hamlet's parched, rock-studded hills far beyond the city. In the wake of Israel's drubbing of the Arab armies in the Six Day war and occupation of the West Bank, the conquerors drew a wide arc deep into Palestinian territory and declared it the new boundary of the Jewish state's "eternal and indivisible capital".

It hardly mattered to the bemused villagers even when Israeli bureaucrats, out of incompetence or malice, declared Nu'man's houses inside this new greater Jerusalem, but said its people were residents of the West Bank.

As the years passed, the 200 or so people living in Nu'man did wonder about the Jewish settlements creeping ever closer but the hamlet's ties were with the West Bank and that was just a short walk to the larger village of Al-Khas where most people shopped, worshipped or worked. Jerusalem's boundary was for the Israelis to worry about.

As work on Ariel Sharon's controversial "security fence" through the West Bank stalled while the Israelis and Washington wrangled over how deep it can cut into Palestinian territory, the government stepped up the pace of construction. What was once an invisible line is rapidly rising as a monolithic partition for many communities and a looming disaster for some such as Nu'man.

Altogether, almost 50 miles of fence and wall will carve through the city's Arab neighbourhoods and the occupied territories declared to be part of Jerusalem. It will force children from about 30 schools to find new ones, divide families that used to live just a couple of minutes' walk apart and separate tens of thousands of people from their work.

"This is the greatest change to Jerusalem, and the way it will function, since Israel occupied the east of the city in 1967," said Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer fighting a legal action against the Jerusalem section of the barrier. "East Jerusalem is a living organism that relies on its connections to the West Bank to survive. The wall is severing those arteries."

To the north of the city, about 24,000 Palestinians will be ghettoised as the fence surrounds a neighbourhood that will be on the Jerusalem side of the barrier but whose residents do not have permission to enter the city. To the south, the barrier already divides Jerusalem from Bethlehem, and part of Bethlehem from itself.

International pressure forced the government to alter the route of the fence where it was to slice through Al Quds university land, but it was a rare concession.

"The official policy is to maintain a 'demographic balance' of 70% Jews to 30% Palestinians in Jerusalem," said Jessica Montell, head of the respected Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem. "It sounds very innocuous for what is a policy to drive people from their homes. There has been an explicit policy to use residency rights and building permits to make life difficult for Palestinians so they leave the city. To that we can now add the security fence."

"People who go two metres down the road to take their kids to school were crossing an arbitrary line in the sand that is now becoming a massive structure."

So far, almost 11 miles of the fence has been completed with one section grinding to a halt just a few hundred metres from Nu'man.

The Israelis say the villagers are living there illegally because they only moved to the area during the 1980s.

The claim infuriates Yusuf Dirawi. He says his family has lived there for generations, first in caves with their sheep and then in tents before the first solid houses were built around 50 years ago. He gestures to stone housing with construction dates in the 1950s carved above the door. Aerial pictures of the area show that the village was well established by 1967.

"How can they say we haven't lived here all these years?" Mr Dirawi asked. "They only have to look around. It's obvious. But they don't want to see."

The first problems came before the fence. In 1995, the Israeli authorities barred the children of Nu'man from attending their nearest school, in a neighbouring Arab village, saying that it was reserved for Jerusalem residents.

Harassment

"Then they destroyed the road connecting us to Jerusalem," said Mr Dirawi. "We received water from a village in the West Bank. They say because we are in Jerusalem we are not allowed to get our water from the West Bank."

The harassment escalated in July as construction of the fence approached. Police came at night and arrested all the men they could find, Mr Dirawi among them.

"I was arrested at 1.15am. We were taken to the Bethlehem checkpoint. We were asked to sign a document saying that we would not return to Israel, meaning Jerusalem. I refused," he said.

The police returned five times over the following month, until human rights lawyers won a high court order preventing the detentions while a legal battle over Nu'man's legal status is resolved.

Israeli officials decline to discuss the case, saying it is still before the courts. But Jerusalem's chief administrative officer, Eitan Meir, has written to B'Tselem saying that Nu'man's residents belong to a clan from Bethlehem and therefore their homes in Nu'man were only "temporary".

The arc drawn in 1967 annexed 40 square miles of Palestinian territory into Jerusalem. Since then, Israel has built 12 large Jewish settlements on Palestinian land inside the boundary that are home to about 170,000 Jews. But almost every Palestinian application for planning permission in the same area is refused.

"What should be a neutral planning tool to protect a green area is used to impose this 'demographic balance'," said Ms Montell. "No Palestinian has been able to get a building permit in Jerusalem, only Jews get them. Israel says it is just enforcing laws that any other city in the world has, but it enforces them according to this 'demographic balance'."

When the fence around Jerusalem is finally put into operation in the coming months, the people of Nu'man will be trapped. Already barred from travelling into the heart of Jerusalem they will also find themselves cut off from the West Bank. Once they leave their village they will not be allowed to return. There will be nowhere for them to work or shop, or for the children to go to school.

"An official came here and told us this would be a 'sterile area' (free of Palestinians) or used for settlement expansion," Mr Dirawi said. "At first we didn't see how they could do it. Now we know."

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